Invest in BPS Outdoor Teaching & Learning Spaces, Curriculum, and Partnerships
Vision: Every Boston Public Schools student will engage in a BPS Pathway of Outdoor Teaching & Learning (OTL) - an intentional experience with OTL at every grade level during a student's time in BPS. This pathway could be designed utilizing the existing BPS OTL assets and partners by investing in these assets and partnerships at the district level.
Boston Public Schools has 35 outdoor classrooms, 70+ school gardens, 5 green stormwater infrastructure sites, and many play structures. Two of our schools even have Freight Farms! These beautiful, invaluable outdoor teaching and learning spaces include natural ecosystem features, sustainable design, weather stations, vegetable and herb beds, and safe play spaces. They inspire and support student learning, physical health, social emotional wellness, imagination, confidence, and leadership, as well as community building and a passion for the natural world. These spaces offer students and teachers onsite living learning laboratories for STEM, the Arts, History, ELA, and vocational skills, etc. and have accompanying standards-aligned curriculum. These spaces spark JOY.
BPS also has many dedicated, instrumental OTL partners like Friends of the Boston Schoolyards, Boston Nature Center, Arnold Arboretum, Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center, CitySprouts, and Green City Growers. Educators themselves, these partners bring critical standards-aligned experiential learning to BPS students through the use of onsite BPS assets or through field trips to the city’s most treasured green spaces. These partners offer programs for different grade levels and could be key to co-creating the OTL Pathway for BPS students.
Currently, these incredible assets and partnerships do not have designated BPS academic, maintenance, or partnership budgets, resulting in inequitable student experience and access, and facilities maintenance, across the district. Following the end of the Boston Schoolyard Initiative in 2014, district staff and partner champions of these spaces have relied on project specific city capital funds, the Community Preservation Act, one-off external grants like USDA, pulling from existing maintenance funds, personal funds, and school budgets (e.g. choosing an outdoor education partnership rather than another possible school partnership), or donations of time, funding, and supplies from volunteers, to keep these spaces in use and maintained. All while requests from more schools, teachers, and students to create new gardens and outdoor classrooms have increased, as interest in climate change and sustainability has evolved. The current funding model is unsustainable, inefficient, and inequitable, and certainly does not allow for anything new.
So how can we reimagine this model and improve the experience for students and teachers?
These same champions have conversed with students and surveyed BPS teaching and facilities staff and OTL partners for needs, and the needs are consistently communicated as: annual Professional Development for teachers to understand how to use/be comfortable with using the OTL assets for teaching and learning; a Facilities Management budget for maintenance, tools, and supplies (e.g. soil, compost, seeds, plants, garden tools) OR school-based budgets for these supplies OR a combination of both; partnership funds or sponsorships so more schools can access the OTL partners, like CitySprouts and Green City Growers; and a dedicated district Outdoor Teaching & Learning Coordinator, split between Academics & Professional Learning and Facilities Management, to support all schools in engaging in OTL, provide a common coordinator for the existing partners, and seek out new OTL partnerships and funding opportunities for BPS.
The existence of and access to these spaces and partnerships in Boston Public Schools is vital for our equity and inclusion commitment- our Boston youth deserve, and have a right to, nature within their own neighborhoods and schoolyards. As a city and district, we must not perpetuate the dangerous, unjust myths that Boston youth must travel far distances to nature, or that nature is only accessible and welcoming to populations of certain incomes and identities. With the opportunity to reimage BPS schools, and the heightened interest in OTL due to COVID-19, we have an opportunity to uplift these underutilized and underfunded assets, and make them a key part of welcoming students and teachers back to BPS, and a key part of healing and learning post-pandemic.
Thank you for providing us with this platform to share ideas. More importantly beyond the sharing of this idea, thank you for inviting us to engage in the “doing of the work” to make this idea a reality- we are ready.
https://bostongreenschools.org/outdoor-education/